World Without Mind The Existential Threat of Big Tech Franklin Foer Books
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A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2017
Franklin Foer reveals the existential threat posed by big tech, and in his brilliant polemic gives us the toolkit to fight their pervasive influence.
Over the past few decades there has been a revolution in terms of who controls knowledge and information. This rapid change has imperiled the way we think. Without pausing to consider the cost, the world has rushed to embrace the products and services of four titanic corporations. We shop with ; socialize on Facebook; turn to Apple for entertainment; and rely on Google for information. These firms sell their efficiency and purport to make the world a better place, but what they have done instead is to enable an intoxicating level of daily convenience. As these companies have expanded, marketing themselves as champions of individuality and pluralism, their algorithms have pressed us into conformity and laid waste to privacy. They have produced an unstable and narrow culture of misinformation, and put us on a path to a world without private contemplation, autonomous thought, or solitary introspection—a world without mind. In order to restore our inner lives, we must avoid being coopted by these gigantic companies, and understand the ideas that underpin their success.
Elegantly tracing the intellectual history of computer science—from Descartes and the enlightenment to Alan Turing to Stuart Brand and the hippie origins of today's Silicon Valley—Foer exposes the dark underpinnings of our most idealistic dreams for technology. The corporate ambitions of Google, Facebook, Apple, and , he argues, are trampling longstanding liberal values, especially intellectual property and privacy. This is a nascent stage in the total automation and homogenization of social, political, and intellectual life. By reclaiming our private authority over how we intellectually engage with the world, we have the power to stem the tide.
At stake is nothing less than who we are, and what we will become. There have been monopolists in the past but today's corporate giants have far more nefarious aims. They’re monopolists who want access to every facet of our identities and influence over every corner of our decision-making. Until now few have grasped the sheer scale of the threat. Foer explains not just the looming existential crisis but the imperative of resistance.
Named one of the best books of the year by The New York Times • L.A. Times • NPR
World Without Mind The Existential Threat of Big Tech Franklin Foer Books
“World Without Mind” is an important, impassioned book that should be required reading for anyone who owns an iPhone or Android, or has a Facebook, Google, or Amazon account.Thirty years ago, college campuses were alive with protest and rebellion. It wasn’t anything like the sixties, but students still embraced the spirit of freedom and insisted on personal choice. The most political camped out in makeshift shantytowns demanding divestiture from South Africa and organized Take Back the Night marches. If a prophetess had appeared and told them that by the time their children were living in dorm rooms they’d be happily tracking their children’s every move via a smartphone app, buying clothing, books, and music recommended by the world’s largest and most secretive corporations, and voluntarily giving those corporations their most sensitive documents and precious memories for safekeeping—those students would not have believed her.
Foer is not a modern-day Cassandra predicting a dystopian future. Rather, he is a veteran journalist whose book “World Without Mind,” describes the world we already live in, but whose power dynamics we have, as a species, almost unanimously failed to grasp. The consequences for continuing to Snapchat and Facebook IM our lives away in blissful ignorance are likely to be profoundly disturbing, but they are also easy to avert.
In one of history’s most ironic twists, the students who were most equipped to rage against the machine—the best and the brightest and the most technologically savvy—spent the sixties, seventies and eighties preparing the ground for the growth of the most powerful corporations the world has ever seen. As Foer documents in his engaging and smart polemic, they were not motivated by an evil desire for control but by a craving for knowledge, community, and connection. Unfortunately for humanity, their motivations did not matter. The power of the tools they build did.
The Trojan horse of corporate control is now inside our gates. It has replicated a billion times and shape-shifted into tools we use hundreds of times a day without thinking. In many cases, a message delivered by one of the four big tech companies is the first thing an ordinary person looks at when they wake up and the last thing they consult before they fall asleep.
It might sound like Foer is against technology. But “World Without Mind” is not a call to revert to a less-connected, pre-Internet age. Foer does not advise throwing away your smartphone and deleting your Facebook account. What he advocates is informed consent fueled by an understanding of the agendas of the biggest technology firms and what they will do to achieve them. The bulk of his book is an engaging discussion of the ideology behind and the motivations of Google, Facebook, and Amazon, with fascinating digressions into Descartes' view of automata, Abraham Lincoln’s use of the telegraph key, and how the 1891 copyright law transformed writing from a hobby into a profession.
“It’s hard not to marvel at these companies and their inventions, which often make life infinitely easier,” Foer says. “But we’ve spent too long marveling. The time has arrived to consider the consequences of these monopolies, to reassert our role in determining our human path.”
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World Without Mind The Existential Threat of Big Tech Franklin Foer Books Reviews
Everyone should read this book, considering he predicted what is now happening to Facebook. While he did not predict which company he did predict that it would happen soon to one of them. A definite read for anyone who spends a lot of time on electronic media so you can decide if it is worth the trade off. He explains how we got where we are today. An eye opener and confirmation (for those who have been uncomfortable about putting their information on the internet) to help us see what is really going on in the unregulated, wild west world of the internet. Very disturbing but information you need in order to make decisions about how and where you want your personal information to be. An extremely well written book, easy to understand while at the same time reminding us how little of our incredible language repository we actually use (another minus from the internet media). A definite encouragement to get the Thesaurus out next time we write anything.
Highly encourage everyone to read this book to understand how much of yourself has been taken and sold for profit and how to fight back.
Franklin Foer’s “World Without Mind” is an excellent book. It identifies important problems, ties the problems to their historical precedents, and suggests some reasonable solutions. The book is not complete, or perfect, but in the emerging literature of why and how to curb the power of giant technology companies, this book is a useful introduction, although there is a long way to go from here to there.
Foer is primarily known as having been editor of “The New Republic,” for several years during the modern era, ending in 2014. Editors come and go, of course, but at the time his dismissal by a new owner felt like a watershed event among the chattering classes in America. This was because the new owner was Chris Hughes—a man of distinctly modest talent and even more modest accomplishments, who became filthy rich by the happenstance of being Mark Zuckerberg’s roommate at Harvard. Hughes, after a brief period of operating The New Republic in close cooperation with Foer, using traditional (i.e., money-losing) journalism, hired some eighth-rate web traffic geek to turn the magazine into clickbait. In that environment, of course, Foer was of no use, so Hughes fired him in the boorish and incompetent manner typical of nouveau riche men of his generation and class. (Hughes no longer owns the magazine, having failed even at operating a clickbait site, and has since moved on to other failures.)
In part, as he admits, Foer wrote his book in response to these events. But this is not a revenge job; it’s just that the story of The New Republic’s travails is illuminating to Foer’s points. Those points are clearly and well made. Yes, Foer seems to think that most history began in the 1960s, with perhaps a few events from the 1700s onward being mildly relevant. But that is an occupational hazard for the educated members of Generation X, and, after all, most of the relevant history to this book began in the 1990s, so if you must have a narrow historical vision, it might as well be in a book about the evils of modern technology firms.
Foer begins with a Prologue, which in many ways is the most intriguing part of the book. Here Foer introduces a key historical parallel for the book, 1950s and 1960s food re-engineering creating the dominance of processed food and frozen dinners. He analogizes that change to the emergent dominance of the technology companies (by which he means “GAFA”—Google, Apple, Facebook, ). As far as food goes, we were promised “convenience, efficiency, and abundance.” We got it—and we also, without meaning to, hugely damaged “our waistline, longevity, soul, and planet.” We were promised similar, but more utopian, benefits by the GAFA companies, some of which we got, along with a heaping of unexpected Bad Things. This tension, between the promises of technology and its costs, is the backbone of Foer’s book.
Foer clearly has a philosophical objection to the arc of modern technology; there is much talk of Descartes, Leibniz, and so on. But the book suffers a bit from being unable to decide if it wants to focus on philosophy or practicality. In his Prologue, Foer lays out a philosophical framework, focusing on what I think is the critical point. “More than any other previous coterie of corporations, the tech monopolists aspire to mold humanity into their desired image of it.” Although he does not use these terms, Foer’s basic point throughout the book is that the GAFA companies and their masters deny the telos of man. They refuse to acknowledge that man has an inherent nature or purpose. Instead, they view humanity in purely instrumentalist terms, subject to unending manipulation—all for mankind’s own improvement, of course, as well as their profit. Thus, while Silicon Valley is often viewed as libertarian, it is not—it is monopolist in economic intent and collectivist utopian in social intent, even if that utopia uses the superficial language of liberty. Silicon Valley considers “the concentration of power in its companies . . . an urgent social good, the precursor to global harmony; a necessary condition for undoing the alienation of mankind.” This utopia is a collectivist one, not one personal to the individual. In fact, Foer even semi-lyrically complains (not citing Josef Pieper, though he should) that “The tech companies are destroying something precious, which is the possibility of contemplation.” And, even if such a utopia may seem desirable, Foer think that utopia is not on its way. Rather, we face enforced conformity, a total loss of privacy, the erosion of thoughtful self-government, and the hobbling of creative genius. We’re becoming Spam—a mediocre, indistinguishable, controlled mass of meat contained in a metaphysical box.
Foer traces this desire by the masters of GAFA, for global harmony and the end of alienation, to the 1960s. More precisely, to Stewart Brand, who founded the "Whole Earth Catalog," and to other pop culture icons like Marshall McLuhan. While I suppose this is true in part, it is a crimped vision. Seeking, and believing you have found, the key to global harmony and the end of alienation has a vastly longer pedigree—through Marxism and its variants; through 19th Century German philosophy; and through much Enlightenment thought. Of course, as Foer sometimes seems to hint, these latter day eschatons are mere secular versions of the ancient Judeo-Christian vision, and Facebook and Google merely offer different re-workings of the Serpent in the Garden, promising us that we will be as gods. Stewart Brand and other hippies are, in truth, irrelevant carbuncles on the shoulders of giants. But Foer’s basic point is true enough—this vision was influential in forming the vision of today’s tech leaders, and it is utopian in form and content. Despite the libertarian stereotype, it is “the exact opposite of Ayn Rand’s vision of libertarianism; [it is] a hunger for cooperation, sharing, and a self-conscious awareness of our place in a larger system.”
"World Without Mind" then turns more practical. It addresses each of the GAFA firms in turn, with a focus on the history of each as it relates to Foer’s themes. None of these companies, of course, produce any relevant amount of knowledge. They are instead gatekeepers and filters, offering efficiency to consumers in exchange for a piece of the action. Foer does not object to the gatekeeper role, as such. He is perfectly well aware that the mass of information that is the Internet cannot be directly addressed by any human and still be of any use. He notes that in the past journalists (totally coincidentally, people just like him) were the honored gatekeepers of both information and its importance, as well as arbiters of much of culture. His Golden Age is the time when the owners of the "Washington Post" honored objectivity, de-emphasized profitability, and regarded their news outlets as a public trust. Foer is aware that this Golden Age was sometimes tarnished, although his examples tend to focus on the clichéd (they enabled Nixon!), not the real (conservatives have been suppressed for decades). But again, his basic point, that the GAFA companies are more like Cerberus out for a snack than a paladin keeping barring enemies from the gate, is sound.
Foer starts with Google, noting that Google regards its actual mission as creating strong AI, followed by augmented humanity and a world where scarcity has been eliminated and all limits on man disappear. I have long known this (it is not like Google keeps it a secret, though few seem to focus on it), but my reaction has always been that Google will ultimately collapse, since this is a stupid business model. Any company that hires Ray Kurzweil to be a top executive is delusional and wasting the shareholders’ money—if the goal is to offer the shareholders money, which here it isn’t. As Foer says, Kurzweil’s “main business is prophecy.” Prophecy does not pay the bills, or at least false prophecy doesn’t. But Foer is correct, and my old reaction was wrong—the business model doesn’t require competition to survive if Google has carved out a niche of permanent dominance, by having such an amount of data that no competitor can even begin to think of competing, and if it has, it can do whatever it wants, whether it makes any business sense or not. Next comes Facebook, whose goal is not the creation of non-human progress, but rather directly augmenting human social progress, by bringing people together, while at the same time telling them what thoughts are permitted to think, and increasingly manipulating them into what to think. Facebook’s focus is algorithmic thinking to apply that data, to which outsiders are not privy, only the priests of Zuckerberg. Finally, monopolizes power over authors (Foer mostly ignores ’s non-book sales) and thereby erodes authorial incentive, thereby crushing genius. crushes authorial genius in books; Google and Facebook do it in newspapers and periodicals; Apple erodes it in music (Apple gets the least direct abuse in this book, implicitly because it has the least power of the type Foer complains of).
But before we get to authorial incentive, we should treat Foer’s grander, if less visceral, practical objection to the behavior of the GAFA companies. That is, why is any of this a problem? It is because their power is destroying our ability to govern ourselves. They are “knowledge monopolies,” a new variation on an old theme. Foer’s other Golden Age is one, from roughly 1880 to 1980, when antitrust enforcement was much more aggressive than today. He divides that into two time periods, though, only one of which he feels should be our new model. In earlier years, monopoly was viewed, by men such as Louis Brandeis, through the Jeffersonian lens of an unhealthy concentration of power tending to the degradation of democracy through its corruption of the democratic process. In later years, however, from roughly 1940 on, monopolies came to be viewed by enforcers only as a problem when they harmed consumers, by raising prices or reducing choice—that is, when they were inefficient. The problem, though, is that today’s monopolies, at least on the surface, benefit consumers quite a bit. They are extremely efficient in that sense. Thus, when in the 1970s academics such as Robert Bork pushed to revise the law to, in effect, only recognize this latter theory, and this view became wholly dominant, the tools to attack monopoly as a broader menace to our society had disappeared. Foer wants to restore those tools, for, as he says, “The Framers preferred liberty to efficiency,” because any monopoly is ultimately the enemy of liberty, especially a monopoly with power over knowledge and communication, which tends to create conformity, the bane of a free people.
As to authorial incentive, there is little doubt that the GAFA companies have reduced the power of, and payments to, authors, which must necessarily reduce incentive to create. Foer sees keeping such payments high as a key pillar of our society. To demonstrate this, he focuses on copyright. He claims that “one of [government’s] primary economic responsibilities is preserving the value of knowledge.” Although there is something to this, and Foer cites both the Constitution and the 1710 Statute of Anne, the progenitor of generally applicable copyright law, he reaches too far when he claims, in essence, that today’s copyright law is a critical element of our entire social system, and, by implication, if authors get paid less due to changing competition, it tears at the fabric of our society. For one, we got by just fine when copyright lengths were far shorter (a maximum of 28 years until relatively recently—now it’s the entire life of the author plus 70 years!). (It is both not true as a reason for the growth of copyright, and an anachronism as an argument, when, speaking of Wordsworth and early copyright, Foer says “Because poets were rarely appreciated in their own time, copyright protections needed to be lengthy—so that there was enough time for the public’s taste to catch up with genius.”) For another, we got by just fine when there was no copyright at all, and when it was spotty in framework and enforcement. Sure, there’s a good argument that more rigid copyright helps authorial creativity and production. Yes, Larry Lessig makes far too broad claims, and yes, anyone who believes “information wants to be free” is an idiot. Yes, the theory that crowdsourced authoring, such as Wikipedia, can compete in accuracy of content or style of delivery with professional, paid content has proven utterly false, as has the idea that crowdsourced anything offers a viable model to replace any paid model with something qualitatively better (other than, perhaps, reviews of consumer products and services). But let’s not elevate any of this to a core principle of good government. Moreover, is not Napster. Foer’s objection is that devalues the traditional hierarchy of authors imposed by publishing houses, instead substituting the whims of the market, and also eroding the power of the publishing houses through its economic dominance. All true, but this is not theft, and copyright law seems to be working as it’s supposed to for authors. So, it’s probably inaccurate to call a “knowledge monopoly”—it is more of a monopsonist, one whose dominance over the buyer’s market, in this case as middleman, allows it to set prices. “Monopoly” is a term better suited to Google and Facebook (although they too erode authorial incentive, as a side effort to controlling the flow of information). This is a less sexy and less compelling claim, though, than that all four GAFA companies are a monolith placing dynamite at the foundation of society.
Regardless of which company should be focus, Foer offers a set of solutions to his two identified problems. First, we should restore the old understanding of monopoly, and the federal government should take aggressive enforcement action. Any firm that controls knowledge to a great degree, especially one that filters that knowledge in a non-neutral way, should be curbed or broken. Second, and buttressing this effort, new regulations, under the aegis of a “Data Protection Authority,” should be created to sharply limit the collection and use of data by technology companies, including requiring automatic deletion of data except upon opt-in and “insist[ing] that they provide equal access to a multiplicity of sources and viewpoints.” Third, we should all realize we need to pay, and we should go back to paying, for quality authorial work, rather than thinking content should be free, and thereby both undercutting authorship and allowing Google and Facebook to direct us, unknowingly, to content they select that we should be consciously choosing for ourselves. Fourth, as with the way much of America has recoiled from processed food, factory farming and other perceived evils (even though that is often “really purchasing the sensation of virtue and rectitude”), we should seek to restore “cachet” to “books, essays, and journalism.” In other words, we should be more highbrow.
I think, at a minimum in the abstract, all of these are good ideas. I, at least, had already started subscribing to more and more periodicals, in paper form, and have abandoned my , as has Foer. If I’ve done it, there must be something to it! I think, though, that absolute neutrality for all non-obscene content should be required, not just offering “a multiplicity of sources and viewpoints,” which is just another word for picking and choosing what is permitted to think. Any technology company that censors any non-obscene content for non-viewpoint neutral reasons should be subject to massive government fines and a private right of action with huge statutory monetary damages. But these are details—the question now is, how can we get this party started?
Foer explicitly thinks that while these proposals seem unlikely to be accepted, that there will be some “catastrophe,” a “Big One,” where some mass exposure of private data will cause such damage to the average person that voters will demand something be done. This is certainly possible (the recent Equifax hack tends in this direction, though it is far from catastrophic enough). Foer says “The best analogy is the financial crisis of 2008. There was nothing that the banks could do to gain political traction in the face of the catastrophe that they unleashed.” Really? In the world I live in, corrupt politicians cooperated with corrupt bankers to make sure banks were completely insulated from the effects of their actions, and exited the 2008 crisis in far better shape than before, having paid no price at all, and passed all the costs on to the average American. It’s the latter, not banks, who lack “political traction.” In fact, I am willing to bet most dictionaries today illustrate their entry for “political traction” with a line drawing of Jamie Dimon. This weak analogy suggests the key flaw in Foer’s hope—catastrophes nowadays are used by the powerful to advance their own interests, not to make changes for the benefit of society as a whole. In all likelihood, unfortunately, the same would happen in a catastrophic data breach.
Some argue that action is not necessary, only more competition over time. Once Microsoft was dominant; now it is not (though it still dominates certain software markets). Once buggy whips were sold all over America. At some point in the near future, probably sooner rather than later, so the argument goes, the GAFA companies will also cede their dominance to new competition. Foer disagrees—he thinks that the collection of data these companies have make them nearly impossible to dislodge from their position. Another argument, made by Tim Wu in “The Attention Merchants,” is that it is primarily our job, not the government’s, to change things. Foer certainly agrees with this in part, as shown by his strong advocacy of returning to paid content and his suggestion that readers, by their consumer choices, have the ability to reverse the monopolistic dominance of the GAFA companies. That is, even aside from any government action, we have the power to redirect our attention. A third argument, related to the second, is that the system we have is what the people want. We get what we deserve, and just because it’s trashy and damaging doesn’t mean we don’t deserve it. Foer, certainly, overstates the ability of the masses to appreciate high-level thought and culture. They want Upworthy, not “The New Yorker.” Foer ascribes the decline of mass appreciation for classical music to Baumol’s cost disease (where activities that have not increased in productivity over time, such as live music performances, become relatively more expensive). That doesn’t even make any sense—live performances are not how classical music is consumed; excellent recordings have been ubiquitous for nearly a century. The decline is much more likely because the coarse tastes of the common people have become economically, and therefore socially, dominant. (For the record, I cannot myself appreciate classical music at all; it all sounds like elevator music to me. I prefer EDM, thus exhibiting my own coarseness.) While these arguments may have something to them, they do not contradict Foer’s core assertion that aggressive government control of knowledge monopolies, now, will benefit society.
There are several areas in this book, though, where an editor’s touch appears to be wholly missing. The correct word is “palate,” not “pallet,” when talking about food tasting—the latter is a wooden frame used for storage and transport of goods. Slightly wrong metaphors abound. Thus, Chris Hughes is introduced as an archetype, a “mythical savior.” But there is no such archetype—maybe “savior of myth,” but “savior” is not something generally associated with “myth,” unless you are Richard Dawkins. Similarly, when describing volumes of press coverage of Donald Trump, Foer refers to “dunes of crap.” But “dune” is not a metaphor for large amount or volume; it is a metaphor for shifting shape and movement. Complete mis-uses of words are also common. Graham Greene’s self-imposed requirement that he write a minimum of 500 words each day is not, as Foer says, a “ceiling”; it is a “floor.” “Cull” is not a synonym for “diminish.” “Coterie of corporations” incorrectly uses a word exclusively used for living creatures (even if Mitt Romney says corporations are people). “Invisibilia” is either a mis-print, or, given the use of “agita” as the plural of “agitation,” an original attempt to reify and make plural an adjective. “Wending” is not a synonym for “winding.” “Militaristic” is not a synonym for “military.” Finally, there are errors of knowledge. “Standing athwart history” is not a term meaning “immature, hopeless and pointless cause”; as Foer seems unaware, that phrase was originated in 1955 by William F. Buckley, Jr., as a battle cry for modern conservatism, a very successful project, until recently, at least. Nor it is true that “During the early Middle Ages, the book was quite literally a miracle.” What does that even mean? These seem like small things, and they are. But in a book written by a professional editor, whose only claim to fame is as an editor, you expect perfection in editing. Like Caesar’s wife, he should be beyond reproach. Plus, of course, Foer’s entire point is to contrast inferior, Buzzfeed-type thought and writing with the refined, perfected thought and writing offered by his class, for which they should be paid handsomely—so any lack of perfection in his own writing seems fair grounds for criticism.
Anyway, these problems do not diminish the power of Foer’s book. It is both telling and ironic that in his Acknowledgements, Foer thanks Anne-Marie Slaughter and the New America Foundation, for their “intellectual comradery.” Comrades or not, since this book went to press, Slaughter and the NAF have been discovered to have been victims of Google’s evil. Google is a major funder of NAF, to the tune of $21 million in recent years, which it funds for the simple purpose of generating propaganda for its own benefit. Slaughter was discovered to have been forced to fire one of NAF’s employees, and disband his team, because he had pushed antitrust enforcement against Google and other tech companies. Just as damaged “The New Republic” when Foer wrote a critical article about the company, Google threatened to punish NAF by withdrawing funding. Slaughter’s unconvincing protestations to the contrary, this is exactly what happened, and it very much proves Foer’s basic point. So I agree—GAFA must be destroyed. Where do I sign up to get my pitchfork and torch?
“World Without Mind” is an important, impassioned book that should be required reading for anyone who owns an iPhone or Android, or has a Facebook, Google, or account.
Thirty years ago, college campuses were alive with protest and rebellion. It wasn’t anything like the sixties, but students still embraced the spirit of freedom and insisted on personal choice. The most political camped out in makeshift shantytowns demanding divestiture from South Africa and organized Take Back the Night marches. If a prophetess had appeared and told them that by the time their children were living in dorm rooms they’d be happily tracking their children’s every move via a smartphone app, buying clothing, books, and music recommended by the world’s largest and most secretive corporations, and voluntarily giving those corporations their most sensitive documents and precious memories for safekeeping—those students would not have believed her.
Foer is not a modern-day Cassandra predicting a dystopian future. Rather, he is a veteran journalist whose book “World Without Mind,” describes the world we already live in, but whose power dynamics we have, as a species, almost unanimously failed to grasp. The consequences for continuing to Snapchat and Facebook IM our lives away in blissful ignorance are likely to be profoundly disturbing, but they are also easy to avert.
In one of history’s most ironic twists, the students who were most equipped to rage against the machine—the best and the brightest and the most technologically savvy—spent the sixties, seventies and eighties preparing the ground for the growth of the most powerful corporations the world has ever seen. As Foer documents in his engaging and smart polemic, they were not motivated by an evil desire for control but by a craving for knowledge, community, and connection. Unfortunately for humanity, their motivations did not matter. The power of the tools they build did.
The Trojan horse of corporate control is now inside our gates. It has replicated a billion times and shape-shifted into tools we use hundreds of times a day without thinking. In many cases, a message delivered by one of the four big tech companies is the first thing an ordinary person looks at when they wake up and the last thing they consult before they fall asleep.
It might sound like Foer is against technology. But “World Without Mind” is not a call to revert to a less-connected, pre-Internet age. Foer does not advise throwing away your smartphone and deleting your Facebook account. What he advocates is informed consent fueled by an understanding of the agendas of the biggest technology firms and what they will do to achieve them. The bulk of his book is an engaging discussion of the ideology behind and the motivations of Google, Facebook, and , with fascinating digressions into Descartes' view of automata, Abraham Lincoln’s use of the telegraph key, and how the 1891 copyright law transformed writing from a hobby into a profession.
“It’s hard not to marvel at these companies and their inventions, which often make life infinitely easier,” Foer says. “But we’ve spent too long marveling. The time has arrived to consider the consequences of these monopolies, to reassert our role in determining our human path.”
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